Housing costs compared to Halls

Hello!

In general is it cheaper to say in Halls or get a house with friends in your second year?
Are houses in Englefield Green alot more expensive than halls?

thanks for your help!

EB

I'll ask my dad and then private message you, he just retired after 25years and was director of estates so he knows all about halls etc

Posted from TSR Mobile

Single rooms in halls are about £500-600/month pro rata, depending on where you are, but includes all of your utilities.

Private accommodation starts at around £350/person/month, averages £400-450, and can be as high as £800. You'll usually need to pay for most or all utilities on top of that, which in total might be somewhere in the region of £50/person/month. An upside is that you have Egham accommodation for almost an entire year usually. The downside is you have to pay for all that time!

Only taking rent into account, private at the low end of the price scale works out about the same as a 30-week contract in Founders/Reid, or a 38-week contract in Kingswood. You then have utilities on top, so unless you take a 38-week contract on campus, even the cheaper private accommodation will likely work out either similar or a little more expensive than halls over the course of a year.

However, there's a huge benefit to private in that you have the place for the entire period of the contract (cf. 30-week contracts where you have to empty the room for holidays, and halls contracts in general where your arrival date is locked, and very late). If you stay at the same place for more than one year, then usually you don't clear out at all between years, and you're much more likely to end up calling your place "home". This is even more of an issue if you don't live within easy travel distance of Egham, or your department schedules events outside of term time (hi geology ).